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New Books in Religion
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Religion
Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on…
- New Books in Religion
Wisdom of the Goddess: The Divine Feminine in South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art
Hillary Langberg discusses Wisdom of the Goddess, an online exhibition she curated for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art featuring nine goddesses…
- New Books in Religion
Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or…
- New Books in Religion
Vanessa R. Sasson, "The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women" (Equinox, 2023)
Vanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request…
- New Books in Religion
David Albertson, "The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure Without Measure" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The writings of ancient and medieval Christian mystics were rediscovered in the twentieth century, and today they are read more widely than ever before. But do…
- New Books in Religion
Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history…
- New Books in Religion
Natasha Heller, "Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan" (U Hawai'i Press, 2025)
In Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan (U Hawai'i Press, 2025), Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first…
- New Books in Religion
Daniel Eastman An, "Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism" (U California Press, 2025)
In the writings of ancient Christians, the near-ubiquitous references to the "fear of God" have traditionally been seen as a generic placeholder for piety…
- New Books in Religion
Knut A. Jacobsen, "Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence" (Routledge, 2025)
Hinduism in the World: Migrations and Global Presence (Routledge, 2025) explores Hindu religion from a global perspective and investigates the presence of…
- New Books in Religion
Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in the seventh…
- New Books in Religion
Daniel Wyche, "The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation" (Columbia UP, 2025)
In The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation (Columbia UP, 2025), Daniel Wyche examines the…
- New Books in Religion
Khaled A. Beydoun, "The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims" (U California Press, 2023)
In The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims (U California Press, 2023), Khaled A. Beydoun details how the American War on Terror has…
- New Books in Religion
Sara Ann Swenson, "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise…
- New Books in Religion
Sonia Hazard, "Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract…
- New Books in Religion
Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)
All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less…
- New Books in Religion
Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish…
- New Books in Religion
Christopher J. H. Wright, "The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative" (InterVarsity Press, 2025)
God's mission is to reclaim the world. The church has a designated role to play. Most Christians would agree that the Bible provides a basis for mission…
- New Books in Religion
Christopher Jain Miller and Cogen Bohanec, "Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement" (SUNY Press, 2026)
The Jain tradition, with roots in ancient India but now spread across the globe, is anything but static and monolithic. In Engaged Jainism, an…
- New Books in Religion
Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)
Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC…
- New Books in Religion
Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century A popular truism derived from…
- New Books in Religion
Erica Brown, "Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning" (Maggid, 2023)
Ecclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." As part of…
- New Books in Religion
Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval…
- New Books in Religion
Paul J. Gutacker, "The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone."…
- New Books in Religion
Adam S. Ferziger. "Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism" (NYU Press, 2025)
In this episode Drora Arussy speaks with historian Adam S. Ferziger about his latest book, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli…
- New Books in Religion
Youshaa Patel, "The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line Between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present" (Yale UP, 2023)
According to a famous prophetic report, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” What does “imitation” here mean? Rather, what does this statement…
- New Books in Religion
Hans Van Eyghen, "The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs" (Routledge, 2023)
Hans Van Eyghen's book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge, 2023) assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two…
- New Books in Religion
Insane for the Light (Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI)
Father Ron Rolheiser’s new book Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years, which is about how to grow old well and be fruitful, first giving…
- New Books in Religion
Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew eds., "Buddhist Masculinities" (Columbia UP, 2023)
While early Buddhists hailed their religion's founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to…
- New Books in Religion
J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in…
- New Books in Religion
Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023)
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and…
- New Books in Religion
Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in…
- New Books in Religion
Russell T. McCutcheon, "Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion" (Routledge, 2023)
Russell T. McCutcheon's essay collection Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Routledge, 2023) argues that the study of religion…
- New Books in Religion
Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Matthew D. McMullen, "The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
For nearly two decades, the Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (U Hawaii Press, 2024) has served as a valuable resource for students and scholars of religion…
- New Books in Religion
David Newheiser et al., "Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection…
- New Books in Religion
Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli, "Citifying Jesus: The Making of a Roman Religion in the Roman Empire" (Mohr Siebeck, 2024)
Religion and urban life are the most successful strategies of handling, enhancing, and capitalizing on human sociability. By integrating religious studies…
- New Books in Religion
Ben Wiggershaus, "The Man of Opened Eye: Ancient Near Eastern Revelatory Convention and the Balaam Cycle" (Gorgias Press, 2025)
Is it possible to read the Balaam narrative of Numbers 22-24 cohesively? Ben Wiggershaus says, “Yes,” and part of his solution is in reading the Balaam Cycle…
- New Books in Religion
Christian Smith, "Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Is traditional American religion doomed? Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans…
- New Books in Religion
Deanna Ferree Womack, "Re-Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia" (Oxford UP, 2025)
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American…
- New Books in Religion
Nathan McGovern, "Seeing Through Religion: An Introduction to the Study of Religion and Religions" (Routledge, 2025)
Seeing Through Religion is a cutting-edge textbook that gives students the tools to learn this valuable subject theoretically, McGovern argues that religion…
- New Books in Religion
Daniel K. Falk and Rodney A. Werline, "Prayer in the Ancient World Vol.1" (Brill, 2027)
Prayer in the Ancient World is the resource on prayer in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. With over 350 entries it showcases a robust selection of the…
- New Books in Religion
John Tolan, "Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2025)
A concise new narrative history of Islam that draws on the transformative insights of recent research to emphasize the diversity and dynamism of the tradition…
- New Books in Religion
Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist…
- New Books in Religion
James Redfield, "Adventures of Rabah and Friends: The Talmud's Strange Tales and Their Readers" (Brown Judaic Studies, 2025)
Adventures of Rabbah & Friends offers a new reader-centered approach to some of the Talmud’s most challenging stories. The Talmud contains about two pages of…
- New Books in Religion
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)
Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars…
- New Books in Religion
Christopher Key Chapple, "Embodied Ecology: Yoga and the Environment" (Mandala Publishing, 2025)
In Embodied Ecology: Yoga and the Environment (Mandala Publishing, 2025), Hindu Studies scholar Christopher Key Chapple explores how Hindu and Yoga traditions…
- New Books in Religion
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity" (U California Press, 2025)
Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity (U California Press, 2025) is an open access tour-de-force study of the power of women's…
- New Books in Religion
Dainy Bernstein, "Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022)
The culture of mainstream American childhood is vastly different than the culture of Orthodox Jewish childhood - which is itself a rich and varied landscape of…
- New Books in Religion
Melanie McDonagh, "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" (Yale UP, 2025)
The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked turn to…
- New Books in Religion
Adam Silverstein, "Haman" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Haman, infamous as the antagonist in the book of Esther, appears as a villainous figure in virtually all varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this…
- New Books in Religion
Shawkat M. Toorawa, "The Devotional Qur'an: Beloved Surahs and Verses" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Devotional Qur'an: Beloved Surahs and Verses (Yale UP, 2025) is a beautifully curated and translated collection of the Qur'anic surahs and verses that are…
- New Books in Religion
Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI
Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind…
- New Books in Religion
John Kieschnick, "Buddhist Historiography in China" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they…
- New Books in Religion
Jeffrey K. Salkin, "Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer" (CCAR Press, 2025)
In this episode Rabbi Marc Katz is in discussion with Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin about his new book Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer (Central Conference of…
- New Books in Religion
Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam" (Yale UP, 2025)
Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical…
- New Books in Religion
Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath, "TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Jasbeer Mamalipurath’s TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is the first of its kind in-depth examination of the…
- New Books in Religion
Yehudah Halper, "Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025). The twelfth-century…
- New Books in Religion
Steven W. Ramey, "Hinduism in Five Minutes" (Equinox, 2022)
Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narratives…
- New Books in Religion
Melodie H. Eichbauer, "Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, Ca. 1120-Ca. 1220" (Routledge, 2025)
Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, ca. 1120-ca. 1220 (Routledge, 2025) considers the study of law within its…
- New Books in Religion
Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler eds., "Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (SUNY Press, 2025) explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary…
- New Books in Religion
Karine Gagné, "Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas" (U Washington Press, 2019)
In her new book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (University of Washington Press, 2019), Karine Gagné explores how relations…